She Was Offered to the Highest Bidder to Settle Her Father’s Debt — Then the Ruthless Duke Laid Ten Thousand Pounds on the Table and Did the One Thing No One in That Room Had Imagined

PART 3

The first fat drops came down into the dust of the garden, releasing a smell of wet earth and crushed stocks so sudden and so green that it was almost violent in the hot air. The candle flames bent in the gust that came before the rain.

“You are right,” he said at last. “It is not charity. I have never given anyone anything in my life and expected it to stay given.”

He held her eyes.

“But the price is not mine to name tonight, Miss Carr. Because it is not a price you owe me. It is a debt I owe your father — one he called in three years ago by letter, and which I refused, and which I have had cause since then to be ashamed of.”

His jaw tightened.

“I did not come here to buy you. I came because when I read your uncle’s invitation, I understood finally what my refusal had cost. And I found I could not sit in London and let it be paid by you.”

The rain came harder, hissing on the leads. Sabine stood with six thousand pounds in her wet, smudged hands and the whole floor of her life sliding out from under her — because whatever she had braced for, it had not been this. Not a debt of her father’s she had never heard named. Not a shame worn by a man who wore nothing.

“What letter?” she said. “My father never mentioned your name to me. Not once I would remember.”

And the Duke of Ravensmore, who had walked into the room the most certain man she had ever seen, went still. For the first time all evening, something crossed his face that she recognised — because she had worn it herself every day for three months. It was the look of a person about to be asked a question he did not know how to answer.

The rain filled the silence he left. It came down in earnest now, drumming the leads, sheeting off the eaves in ropes that caught the last of the candlelight and turned to falling glass.

“You would do well to lock that away tonight,” he said at last, looking at the paper in her hands instead of at her. “Somewhere your uncle does not know. A settlement is only paper until a court says otherwise, and your uncle strikes me as a man who reads paper closely when it costs him.”

“You are changing the subject.”

“I am.” He inclined his head, not troubling to deny it — and she found she preferred that to a lie. “The letter is a long story, and it is late, and you have had, I think, a very long evening. I will not spend the end of it standing in your uncle’s drawing room unravelling my own conduct for your entertainment.”

“It would not entertain me,” Sabine said. “That is precisely why I want it.”

Something shifted behind the gray-dark eyes. Not quite amusement, but a near neighbour of it.

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose it would.”

He reached for his gloves. “Your father wrote to me three years ago this autumn. He asked something of me that a better man would have granted inside the hour, and I refused him — not cruelly, I told myself, but with a great many reasons. All of them sound. Every one of them, I have since discovered, a coward’s. He never wrote again. I heard he was gone this spring from a paragraph in the Chronicle, between a horse sale and a christening. That is the whole of it that I will give you tonight.”

“That is not the whole of anything. What did he ask?”

“Good night, Miss Carr.”

“You cannot walk six thousand pounds and half a confession into my hands and then bid me good night as though you had returned a borrowed book.”

He was already turning for the door. At that he stopped, and looked back at her over his shoulder with the rain loud behind him, and for a moment the hard face was almost rueful.

“That,” he said, “is the most sensible thing anyone has said to me in a twelvemonth. I dislike it extremely.”

He drew the second glove on.

“I am at the Ravensmore Lodge, above Fenwick — four miles the far side of the beeches. When you have read your paper, and slept, and decided what you think of me, you will write and tell me, and I will answer whatever you ask. Not before. You are not fit to hear it tonight, and I am not fit to say it well.”

He bowed — a small exact bow, the bow of a man who gave them rarely and meant them when he did.

“Lock the paper away.”

And he went out into the rain hatless, and she heard his boots on the wet gravel, and the low word he gave a horse, and then the drum of hooves fading under the drum of the water, until there was only the storm and the guttering candles and Mrs. Puit breathing at her shoulder.

“Four miles the far side of the beeches,” Mrs. Puit said thoughtfully, working a stitch loose on her needle. “Well, he gives good directions. I’ll grant the man that. Your uncle can’t find his own study of a morning without a footman to point.”

Sabine looked down at the paper. The ink had smudged where her thumb had held it — a small blue-black bruise across her own name — and the candle warmth had gone out of it and left it merely damp. She read the three lines again. Settled solely and absolutely upon Miss Sabine Carr, spinster.

They were the words she had wanted her whole ruined spring. And now that she had them, she felt only the odd vertigo of a woman who has been leaning hard against a door that is suddenly opened from the other side.

“Puit,” she said. “He knew my father.”

“So it seems.”

“My father never spoke his name. Not in the accounts, not in his letters, not once at the table. And my father spoke of everyone.” She pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes briefly and took it away. “A man does not refuse a stranger and carry the shame of it three years. You do not owe a stranger a debt of honour. So they were not strangers — and I never heard of it. And I sat with my father every evening of the last winter of his life while he told me who owed him money, and who owed him nothing, and who was not to be trusted with a horse.”

Her voice thinned.

“He had every chance to say Ravensmore. He did not.”

Mrs. Puit set down her knitting. She was a small round woman with a face like a good apple kept too long — sweet, and a little wrinkled — and she had a way of going quiet that was more comforting than any amount of talk.

“Perhaps,” she said gently, “he was ashamed, too. Men are, my dear, about the things they beg for and don’t get. Your father was a proud man in a plain coat. If he asked that duke for something and was told no, he’d have swallowed the whole business sooner than let you see him refused.”

She retrieved a fallen stitch.

“It’s not a comfortable thought. But it fits the man I buried better than any villain does. It fits.”

“It fits,” Sabine agreed. “I don’t like that it fits.”

“No. The true things rarely have the manners to be pleasant.”

Mrs. Puit rose, joints cracking, and crossed to the windows to draw them against the wet gusting in over the sills.

“Lock the paper away,” she said. “There’s a duke and a companion of forty years since both telling you the same, so you may as well do it. There’s a loose board under the third stair. I keep the good candles there, from your uncle, who’d burn them at cards. It’ll hold a folded sheet.”

Sabine folded the settlement along the clerk’s crease and held it a moment against her breastbone. Outside, the thunder rolled away northward, spent, and the rain settled into the long steady sound of a night that meant to go on raining.

She did not sleep before the grey came up.

And in the morning the trouble came, as it always did in that house, dressed and downstairs before her.